Sleek Backyard Office

We’ve posted a few interesting backyard pods lately. Modern and not entirely practical (as some of you have pointed out!) This one though, I think you’ll agree, just might work. In fact, it’s so well-designed you may end up spending an awful lot of time in the backyard. It’s called the Cowboy and is part of a collection of modern prefab from Form & Forest. “Form & Forest is the brainchild of Jeff and Ryan Jordan.  Aside from being brothers, they also happen to share a dual passion for both great design and weekend escapes to the cabin.  Form & Forest is the result of the happy marriage of these disparate yet complimentary passions.”

Five Fabulous: Staplers

This is the first in an occasional series from our new contributor Amy Feezor (you saw Amy’s home office a few weeks ago here). Amy’s going to give us product round ups and also a new regular series on music (look out for that on Wednesdays starting next week.) Welcome Amy!

Keep it together (or at least look good while attempting to) with our favorite picks for an office accessory that can make a surprising desktop statement: the humble stapler.

1. Blomus Stapler ($56):  J.R. Schebendach’s timeless, stainless-steel simplicity increases any desk’s chic factor. Get it: mcasd.org Image via Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

2. Swingline Collectors Edition 747 Business Stapler ($17.71): This legendary candy-colored workhorse looks cute, but means business. Get it: amazon.com. Image via amazon.com.

3. Italian Stapler, (£11.50): Commonly used by Italian office workers, these cheery staplers are so clever, they look like they’re always smiling (wouldn’t you, if you lived in Italy?). Get it: presentandcorrect.com. Image via presentandcorrect.com.

4. Michael Sodeau’s “Anything” stapler, $39: The new ANYTHING collection—a collaboration between UK designer Michael Sodeau and Japanese firm Suikosha—could be the next “it” product line (read: invest now). Get it: aplusrstore.com. Image via aplusrstore.com.

5. Fun Stapler by Zenith, ($32): The name says it all. Use with one hand and start up some serious stapling. Get it: plasticashop.com. Image via plasticashop.com.

Inspiration: Home Away From Home

Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer and author (you can see his work here). I spoke to him about his SoHo studio and what makes his office feel like home.

Your office has a distinctly residential feel, was that intentional? Where is the office?I believe that I spend more time in the office than at home, so the residential feel is comforting, and probably an outgrowth of the amount of time I spend here. The office is in SoHo, New York City.

What does an average work day involve? On a typical day, I take the subway to work, grab a coffee and start addressing any emails that need my attention. Then I move to the calendar and make sure everything I have to do today is accounted for and the deadlines will be met. The rest of the day could be design, research, coding, light internetting, or proposal writing. Lunch is typically a sandwich, soup or salad, more coffee and probably a cookie. Work winds down between 7 & 9, when I’m either off for socializing, eating, exercising, relaxing at home or a combination of those activities. Then I start over the next morning.

Is there any form of technology that really helps you with your work? The tool that differentiates my machine is the Wacom Tablet I’ve used for the last 5 years. After developing some bad habits using a mouse with a scroll wheel and some frightening numbness in my wrist, I switched to the tablet, and for better or worse, I can now work endlessly without any worries of repetitive stress injuries. Also, the pen makes a good fiddling or percussive instrument while chatting or thinking or getting distracted by music.

How do you organize your space? I would say that the core organizing principle of my spaces is “cloistered disarray”. On the computer, I try to keep my files pretty impeccably organized, but I’m happy to let my desktop stack up with files and virtual brik-a-brak. Every few weeks, I’ll purge and clean the desktop, or just sweep everything into a “desktop junk” folder.
In the physical space, I really like my immediate desk to be tidy, but will allow the papers and books that need to be reviewed and filed to stack up and become cluttered as long as it’s confined to a chair or another table that’s marginally out of the way.

What item from your desktop can you not do without? That would be the pen/key/flash memory drive dish that confines the loose items. I am also partial to the meteorite I keep on my desk.

What is your favorite piece of office furniture? It’s probably more of a fixture than furniture, but the restaurant order grippers that line the wall are particularly fantastic. They create this great visual axis on which any imagery or inspiration I find can slip into without leaving tack marks or holes.

What inspires you? I think the questions WHY or HOW keep me inspired. Whenever I hear a story that answers those questions, I perk up and pay attention and the wheels in my mind start spinning. I think these questions help spawn more inquiries and theories that foster curiosity and help to re-imagine the way things have been approached previously.

[Photos by Ellen Warfield - look out for more from Ellen very soon]

A Handy Camera Buying Guide

David Airey just did a great guide to DSLR cameras on his blog. Lots of good info in a really easy to navigate post. Well worth a look if you are in the market for a camera.

Apartment Therapy’s Founder Talks Shop

Photo: Jim Franco: www.jimfranco.com

Talking to Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder and New York editor of Apartment Therapy, is fascinating. You start to understand why this online community, with its 4 million monthly visitors, is so popular. During the course of the interview Maxwell manages to move seamlessly from a discussion about blogs versus newspapers and his time as a Waldorf teacher to European home offices and what color works best in a living room. Every topic, big or small, is given serious consideration. There is an underlying kindness to Maxwell that permeates the site. As he says “Apartment Therapy isn’t snarky, or edgy or even fast, it’s not the newest latest thing we are covering. The whole goal was to help people with their homes, to get them over the finishing line, most would love help from an interior designer or architect but don’t know where to start.” Apartment Therapy has become a very good place to start.

But, enough from me, here is Maxwell:

On blogs: “My wife is a real magazine reader and there’s so much discussion around the demise of magazines and whether blogs are undermining them. Blogs don’t compete with magazines – we compete with newspapers. You post on a blog and then move onto the next thing, it’s very forward looking, fast. And much closer then to a newspaper model than a magazine model.”

On his years as a Waldorf teacher: “[Those years] very much inform my work – now it’s just a much bigger classroom! After teaching for 5 years at a Waldorf school I could have gone on and taken a new class. But I wanted something else. I wanted to live on a larger plane, schools can be small parochial places. I wanted to be rid of the politics.”

“And I had studied design, my first job out of college was as a designer. And I was still very much interested in design. Waldorf is connected to design right down to the chairs and desk and furniture and the color of the walls through all the grades. Design is central and there is a strong belief that the right design can have a very positive effect.”

“I did home visits and the children who had ‘good’ homes – neat, clean and well organized, did better in my classroom. Not necessarily the smartest – it was the ones with a good home foundation. And I thought a lot about that. I was fascinated with that. Being a teacher you need to live the model life. You have to start where you are.”

On starting Apartment Therapy: “At this time I found myself reading the business section of the newspaper more than any other section. It was that time in America before Bush where there was a real optimism in this country around business – business was creative and practical and honest. I craved that opportunity.”

“So in 2001 I started what turned out to be an early version of Apartment Therapy in the summer and gave myself a year to try it out. If it didn’t work I would go back to teaching.”

Read more

A Chair Makeover

Artist Mike Perry has taken a design classic – the Eames rocking chair – and given it a very interesting makeover. Grace posted a nice piece on the chair over at Design*Sponge. I contacted Mike and he’s going to give us an interview so keep an eye out for his wild workspace.

Monday Morning Inspiration

A bulletin board from Italian artist Beatriz Macias. Check out her beautiful color project. She’s photographing one color a month, one picture a day, for 365 days.

Inspiration: Materialicious’ Editor

This has to be one of the most interesting interviews we’ve run. Justin Anthony is the creator of Materialicious. It’s the go-to site for visual inspiration on architecture and design. The model is interesting – architects and designers submit their work to Justin, who works on his own, and he curates the site. You often get work here that hasn’t been published anywhere else. I love it for its clean design and the layout. You click on a building you like and a grid of 16 similar images appears on the page along with the image you chose. It’s that Pandora idea of  ”if you like this you might also like that”. With so many images out there Justin has created a clever way of cutting through the visual noise of the internet. You imagine the creator of such a site to live in a home like those featured. I saw lots of glass and concrete and a well-edited collection of furniture. Not quite.

How long have you worked from home…and where is ‘home’? Materialicious was created in March 2007. Prior to that I spent 25 years in the residential restoration trade. I grew up in a huge apartment filled with beautiful stuff in the Alwyn Court building in New York City. For me, “home is where the heart is”, and my heart will always belong to NYC. But I’m a restless soul, and having moved many, many times over the years, the idea of carting so much “stuff” around has become less and less appealing. So, for now, my most precious belongings (art, antiques/vintage and collectibles) are in long term storage and will remain there until I finally settle down.

‘Home’ this winter is currently a tiny guesthouse with pool and dock on Siesta Key, on the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a quiet spot – I look out past the pool onto a canal and there are palm trees everywhere, swaying in the breeze. The beach is a block away and only locals go there to fish. I went to Ikea and loaded up my little pickup with everything I needed for 600 bucks. I like it. For now. Generally, as long as I have peace and quiet around me, I can work just about anywhere.

What does an average work day involve? I work every day, at the kitchen counter, and since I work alone I must check in to the site frequently. I get up about 7, make coffee and feed the cat (a stray who moved in about a month ago), then fire up the laptop which remains on until bedtime. I do all my chores and shopping whenever it’s most convenient (usually in the middle of the day, during the week), and I bop around doing whatever, whenever the mood strikes me. I keep in touch with friends and family using IM and emails, Facebook and Twitter throughout the day. With the laptop smack in the middle of everything, the work gets done, automatically. It’s second nature.

Is there any form of technology that really helps you with your work? All I need is my laptop and wireless access. I don’t need a phone, nor do I have a printer or scanner. If I need something printed or scanned (rarely), I just mosey on down to the drugstore and do it there. It’s cheap and convenient. I love the freedom that the Internet allows me.

How do you organize your space? I’m thinking here of your physical space but also your virtual space (any particular software or program that helps keep things under control?) I work with my laptop on the kitchen counter, and I loathe clutter. Important papers are stored in one portable file box, stored in the closet, and everything is scanned and backed up online (as well as on thumb-drives). Google is an amazing thing: I use it for just about everything: search, email, creating documents, storage of photos, etc. and even earn some money with it on my site. Of course, banking and the rest are also done online, so paper is kept to an absolute minimum.

What item from your desktop can you not do without? Notepad and pen. I’m a scribbler and like to jot thoughts down on paper. And having a window to look out at the world while I’m working is a must.

What is your favorite piece of office furniture? I have no office furniture at the moment. I work at the kitchen counter and sit on a Franklin folding bar stool from Ikea, which also comes in handy as a laptop stand when I sit on the couch. I have never been able to get comfortable in any desk chair, and I prefer the half-sitting, half-standing position at the high kitchen counter. I never sit still for long, anyway.

What inspires you? Everything. Nothing. I’m just an observer here.

Where Other People Work

This probably should have waited until next week’s High Five’s but it’s just too good to sit on. It’s a Tumblr blog simply called Workspaces and it is an absolute treasure trove of work spaces – from an old black and white photo of Walt Whitman‘s sitting at his desk to a crisp white contemporary home office complete with Eames chair. Tumblr does these sorts of picture-driven, text-light blogs so well.

What to Wear When

I’m writing from our kitchen table for a few more weeks, as our office reno has been put on hold by a houseguest. This morning it’s noteworthy to add that at 8:30 a.m. I’m dressed and ready to seize the day. After three months of working from home, I think I’ve maxed out on hearing my fellow telecommuters brag about being able to work in a bathrobe. Call me old fashioned, but there’s something to the idea of dressing the part. I’ve discovered that I’m far more productive when I shower and dress first thing in the morning versus lingering too long in a favorite Liberty of London bathrobe…kind of the same concept of school uniforms promoting discipline, unless of course you’re Britney Spears.

[Photo via philippemalouin.com]